Chello Broadband

Dates: March 2001 – 20th January 2002
Position: Feeds Developer

Responsibilities:

1. Writing Perl scripts to pick up content from providers
2. Delivering content from scripts into CMS
3. Using and helping to improve the in house CMS system
4. Testing content for Interactive TV
5. Writing Bug reports for Interactive TV and the CMS team
6. Improving and using in house Perl modules
7. Documentation of any changes made to the in house Perl modules

I worked at chello in a team of four programmers, working very closely with the CMS development team to improve and ensure that the content from the providers is able to be inserted into this application. One of the main difficulties is when chello decided to insert the Liberate content into the CMS. There were a number of complications due to the way the Liberate TV platform was implemented. The main day to day duties involved writing Perl scripts to pick up the content and alter it for chello use. The content was provided in either XML, TXT, CSV and other formats. All code was backed up by the CVS revision control system.

Projects:
Producers Mate
This is the most recent project that I was asked to help out on. The idea is that chello require a tool that they can access from the outside so that the producers can check to see if the content is up to date and that the sites are running properly.

My involvement was to amend the logging module for the content collection scripts so that it can be interpreted by my PHP script to tell the producers if the script performed its action properly. If the script had gone wrong it would give the option to rerun the the script from the console and allow the producer to view the results. The main front end for the producers was provided in a mixture of HTML, DHTML, PHP and using CSS and had to be driven towards a user friendly interface.

SMIL Automation
This was my first major project at chello. They had a lot of content being delivered in SMIL to the RealPlayer. They were trying to cut down on the amount of files and the amount of development time needed to create the SMIL.

I was issued with a base template and with that I implemented a few PHP scripts to pick up the template, make on the fly alterations and serve it to the public. Parameters were passed to the PHP scripts in the URL to determine the country of origin, provider and such like. Once complete the final PHP code not only cut down on the amount of SMIL files they had to place on the server but also the amount of work needed to place them.